Suddenly, I Find Myself Catching The Halloween Spirit

So, I've just started reading Ray Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes, which is doubtless one of those books that I really should have read ages ago, but somehow never got around to. And a more utterly perfect Halloween read it's hard to imagine. There's just something about Bradbury's writing style that, all by itself, is capable of sending lovely little shivery feelings down your arms and the back of your neck. Man, but that guy can write.

Just take a look at the prologue:

First of all, it was October, a rare month for boys. Not that all months aren't rare. But there be bad and good, as the pirates say. Take September, a bad month: school begins. Consider August, a good month: school hasn't begun yet. July, well, July's really fine: there's no chance in the world for school. June, no doubting it, June's best of all, for the school doors spring wide and September's a billion years away.

But you take October, now. School's been on a month and you're riding easier in the reins, jogging along. You got time to think of the garbage you'll dump on old man Prickett's porch, or the hairy-ape costume you'll wear to the YMCA the last night of the month. And if it's around October twentieth and everything smoky-smelling and the sky orange and ash gray at twilight, it seems Halloween will never come in a fall of broomsticks and a soft flap of bedsheets around corners.

But one strange wild dark long year, Halloween came early.

One year Halloween came on October 24, three hours after midnight.

At that time, James Nightshade of 97 Oak Street was thirteen years, eleven months, twenty-three days old. Next door, William Halloway was thirteen years, eleven months and twenty-four days old. Both touched toward fourteen; it almost trembled in their hands.

And that was the October week when they grew up overnight, and were never so young any more...

And if that doesn't make you want to read the book, nothing will.

Here's something this book's got me wondering about, though: What on Earth is it that makes carnivals seem so creepy? When you actually go to them, there's nothing remotely scary about the things at all. Even the haunted house, if there is one, is usually pretty lame. But in books and movies, there's something about a carnival that can just totally make your flesh crawl and all the hairs on your neck stand up. Why is that, do you think?